Frame integration and head-switching

Abstract Employing Frame Semantics as implemented in the Berkeley FrameNet database, this paper analyzes English sentences expressing concerns of risk derived from the British National Corpus and their Japanese translations (created for the purposes of the current study). It introduces the ideas of content and interpretation predicates, frame integration, and head-switching as effectual devices for recognizing obscure constructional equivalences across languages. Our findings shed light on the development of a new contrastive framework for verbal predicativity: that is, a framework based on the recognition of content and interpretation predicates and how it intersects with the categorical distinction in lexicalization patterns between verbs and adverbs.